ICF Update — Jan 14th

ICF RFP Governance Module Improvements; Cosmos Hub Stargate Upgrade HAPPENING NOW; CosmWasm MusselNet; Progress report: NFT+Metadata Standards; Citizen Cosmos; Orijitech Starting Cosmos SDK Benchmarking; Onur Akpolat Joins Interchain GmbH; UniFi DAO Demo Day; Runtime Verification; LazyLedger Optimistic Rollup Mod; Chainapsis Launches Interchain Accounts with Starport;

Published in

Interchain Ecosystem Blog

5 min readJan 14, 2021

Welcome to the ninth edition of our bi-weekly update! We’ll be using this space to highlight some of the exciting activities that took place at the Interchain Foundation over the last two weeks — in this case with the holidays it’s actually been four weeks. This includes some check-in meetings that occurred with various funding recipients, as well as goings-on that members of the Interchain ecosystem might find interesting and informative.

If any of the updates are especially relevant to what you are working on, feel free to drop us a line at hello@interchain.io.

If you’re interested in applying for funding, take a look at our process, our request for proposals and submit at apply.interchain.io by February 14th for consideration in Q1 of 2021.

If you missed the last update, check it out at ICF Update — Dec 15th.

ICF RFP Governance Module Improvements

The ICF has put together a Request for Proposals related to improvements to the Cosmos SDK Governance Module. They cover the gamut from strict engineering tasks and features to operation and testing of the features as well as stewardship of a working group and establishing protocols for off-chain proposal processing and community feedback. If you want to see an increase in the capacity of the hub for self-governance, apply now or share widely.

Cosmos Hub Stargate Upgrade HAPPENING NOW

The proposal is live (LunieLight, BigDipper, Minscan) to upgrade Gaia, the codebase that runs the Cosmos Hub, to use Cosmos SDK v0.40.0 which contains IBC and performance increases through use of protobuf serialization. VOTE NOW and, if you’re a validator or a service provider, make sure you’re prepared for the upgrade to CosmosHub-4 by following instructions at stargate.cosmos.network.

CosmWasm MusselNet

Confio launched the latest Stargate compatible CosmWasm testnet called MusselNet-2. Take a look at their announcement, follow instructions on github, and join their Discord to participate in the discussion and community.

Progress report: NFT+Metadata Standards

We are moving towards consensus on Interchain standards which could define the future of NFTs and Metadata in the universe of interconnected blockchains. The InterNFT working group is calling for feedback and debate on draft RFCs for Interchain Identifiers (IID), an IID Document format for the metadata which represents tokenised resources and their associated rights, as well as new Interface standards. Reference implementations are being developed for the Cosmos SDK and an early version of the new NFT module is available for testing.

Check out the demonstration of a user interface, including NFT wallet, in the upcoming Working Group call on Thursday 21 January. This article, just published in the Cosmos blog by Shaun Conway (ixo), gives a great update on the current status of these developments. Please share this and spread the word to anyone who might be interested in contributing towards, or learning more about this exciting work.

Citizen Cosmos

Grant recipients Citizen Cosmos, released their 20th and 21st episodes since the last ICF update. This includes an interview with Tushaw Aggarwal from Persistence One and Institutional DeFi. Prior to that they recorded 7 episodes since last August when they received an ICF grant. Working backwards these include Zarko Milosevic from Informal Systems; Anoine Herzog from Starname; Deborah Simpier from Althea Network; Chris Remus from Chainflow; Tor Blair from Secret Network; Billy Rennekamp from ICF; and Josh Lee from Chainapsis.

Orijitech Starting Cosmos SDK Benchmarking

Orijitech continues to work meticulously on security and performance integrity of the Cosmos SDK and has recently coordinated with Ethan Frey, CEO of Confio, to begin a full revamp of benchmarking the Cosmos SDK. Ethan did the last work around benchmarking when he was still working as an engineer for Tendermint Inc. and has provided a lot of suggestions to ensure the benchmarks test production-like scenarios when the state of the blockchain is similar to a live network in order to ensure realistic benchmarks.

Onur Akpolat Joins Interchain GmbH

As the first hire to the Grants and Developer Relations team at Interchain GmbH since Sam Hart in March of 2020, Onur Akpolat expands the team to three. He comes to us after helping build up Monadic, the team building Radicle (previously osCoin), a framework for decentralized code collaboration. Prior to that Onur founded a company that went through TechStars Boston before being acquired. Onur also previously ran an Ethereum mining operation and has a german language podcast called KryptoHelden.

UniFi DAO Demo Day

UniFi Dao ran a Demo Day today to demonstrate some of the most exciting projects launching in the Cosmos Ecosystem. The details can be found at unifidao.vc and the recordings are available on youtube. The lineup included ICF funding recipients Agoric, Akash Network, Confio, Persistence, Regen Network and Tendermint Inc.

Runtime Verification

The ICF started a service agreement with Runtime Verification to better document the Staking, Slashing, and Evidence modules of the Cosmos SDK in preparation for an upcoming code refactor + formal modelling effort by Informal.

LazyLedger Optimistic Rollup Mod

LazyLedger started work on an optimistic rollup module for the Cosmos SDK and are drafting an ADR outlining changes to the SDK state commitment and storage system. Follow the discussion on github here.

Chainapsis Launches Interchain Accounts with Starport

Chainapsis has completed their final milestone by publishing the first implementation of Interchain Accounts. Read their announcement here and follow the tutorial that includes cutting edge techniques to utilize the Cosmos SDK scaffolding tool, Starport, to launch Interchain Account enable blockchains today. This would allow entire networks to collectively stake ATOMs from their community pool to the Cosmos Hub and further increase the hub’s value and security. This is of course just one possible use of Interchain Accounts which are likely to make it onto the upcoming Cosmos Hub roadmap.

Thanks for catching up on our ninth update. We’ll be working on the format to keep it brief but informative. If there are things you’d like to hear more about, feel free to reach out to hello@interchain.io or ping us on Twitter at @interchain_io.